“Clara!” Ivy squealed, the pacifier tumbling from her mouth and bouncing harmlessly against Finn’s arm. She barely registered its loss, her whole focus narrowing onto the figure at the end of the carriage. Finn didn’t resist when she pushed against his chest, wriggling free with a clumsy urgency. He set her down carefully on the velvet bench across from Clara, steadying her for a moment before withdrawing.

Clara turned at the sound of her name, sunlight glinting off her hair in a soft halo. A smile broke across her face, untouched by the distortion clinging to the edges of the world. She opened her arms, beckoning.

Ivy stumbled forward, half-crawling, half-running, and threw herself into Clara’s waiting embrace.

“Hi there, baby girl,” Clara cooed, gathering Ivy close against her chest, pressing a kiss into the crown of Ivy’s head. Her hand moved in slow, affectionate circles across Ivy’s back, and her voice dipped into the same syrupy cadence Ivy had heard too many times already. “Have you been a good girl for Daddy?”

Ivy stiffened, her breath hitching against Clara’s shoulder. The words struck wrong, souring the moment with their casual sweetness. But Ivy clung tighter anyway, squeezing her eyes shut.

“Clara! You’re okay!” she said, forcing the words past the tremble in her throat, desperate to ignore the question.

Clara chuckled, the sound light, musical, at ease. She ruffled Ivy’s hair with one hand, smoothing down unruly strands with the other, as if Ivy were some beloved pet needing tending.

“Of course, sweetheart,” Clara said, her voice pitched low and reassuring. “What did you think would happen to Mommy?”

Ivy froze.

Mommy?

She pulled back, searching Clara’s face with wide, bewildered eyes. Clara smiled at her, the same patient, indulgent smile adults reserved for children who had said something foolish.

“Mommy?” Ivy echoed, her brow furrowing deep enough to ache. She swallowed, fighting down the instinct to be small, to be safe. “Clara, it’s me. Ivy. Don’t you remember?”

The train rumbled beneath them, the steady pulse of the wheels a heartbeat Ivy could not escape. The meadows outside blurred past in endless green and gold, the world outside indifferent to the unraveling inside the carriage.

Clara giggled—a light, teasing sound that felt like ice on Ivy’s skin.

She shifted Ivy in her lap, balancing her with one arm while her free hand tickled Ivy’s sides with playful affection. Ivy squirmed, a whimper escaping her lips before she could choke it back.

“Do you really think I’d forget the name of my baby?” Clara asked, her tone dripping with fond amusement. “Of course I know who you are, sweetheart!”

Ivy stared up at her, heart hammering so hard it made her vision pulse at the edges.

Clara’s eyes were soft, full of love.

And wrong.

So wrong.

Because the real Clara had a fire behind her gaze. A sharpness that refused to be dulled, even under the worst pressure. This Clara’s eyes were glassy pools of syrup and lullabies, wide and kind and empty in a way that made Ivy’s stomach twist.

She reached up slowly, fingers trembling, and cupped Clara’s cheek.

“Clara...” she whispered, voice cracking, the word heavier than stone.

The warmth of Clara’s skin beneath her palm should have been comforting.

It wasn’t.

It was a mask. A perfect, delicate mask hiding something beneath it.

Clara leaned into her touch, sighing as if Ivy’s presence completed something, as if this moment were the pinnacle of some long-awaited dream.

Outside, the sun blazed brighter, the meadows shining so fiercely it hurt to look.

Inside, Ivy stared into Clara’s eyes, searching—pleading—for the real girl she had fought beside, laughed with, endured the unspeakable Trials for.

Finn settled beside Clara with a familiarity that twisted Ivy’s stomach into knots. His arm slid around Clara’s shoulders, as if they had done this a thousand times before. He leaned in, his forehead brushing Clara’s temple, both of them turning their faces toward the window without a word. Ivy stared at them, heart pounding in her chest, feeling the fragile scaffolding of her world crack beneath her feet.

“Finn... Clara... what’s going on?!” she demanded, her voice sharp, cutting against the low rumble of the train.

Neither answered.

The soft, easy smiles they wore faded into something heavier, something more distant, as their eyes stayed pinned to the sunlit horizon rolling by outside.

Ivy twisted on Clara’s lap, following their gaze.

The carriage shuddered faintly beneath her, but she hardly noticed. Her breath caught hard in her throat.

The train was far longer than it had been—its silver body stretching and winding around a massive curve, the view offered up like a cruel gift. She could see the locomotive now, a black serpent pulling the endless chain of carriages forward. Except something was wrong. Deeply, viscerally wrong.

The engine screamed against the rails—wheels sparking, smoke billowing—before it tore free from the tracks altogether. It leapt into the void like a creature flinging itself from a cliff, dragging the first carriages with it. Ivy watched in horror as the train yanked each carriage from the rails, one by one, tumbling them down a newly formed chasm.

The carriages crumpled like toys as they tumbled, swallowed by clouds of smoke and shrieking metal.

The derailment raced toward them like a living thing.

Ivy spun, panic clawing through her chest, reaching for Clara and Finn. They were looking at her now—watching her—with the same terrible softness.

“What’s going on?!” Ivy screamed, voice raw, the scent of burning metal already filling the air.

They only smiled.

Twin, heartbreakingly tender smiles.

“Come back to us, baby girl,” they said together, their voices overlapping into a single chime that rang too perfectly through the trembling air.

The sound of tearing metal roared up behind her. The carriage lurched violently to one side, pitching Ivy into Clara’s arms. The world tilted. Lights shattered. Smoke and fire and heat swallowed the edges of vision, the train groaning as it peeled itself apart.

Ivy’s body tensed, bracing for impact.

And then—nothing.

No pain. No heat. No weight at all.

Only darkness.

She floated in a vast, endless void, untouched and unbroken, as if the train, the meadows, the sun, had never existed. Her body hung suspended, adrift in a place without up or down, without sound or breath or the beating of her heart.

Only her.

The question still burned at the center of her soul: What was real anymore?

Ivy’s feet touched down onto the tiled floor with a soft, hollow sound, the surrounding void remaining vast and unbroken, an endless canvas of nothingness that pressed in against her. She stood alone, the last traces of the burning train evaporating from her senses like a dream dissolving in morning light.

A figure emerged from the dark. She recognized the figure instantly. The hooded cloak, the impossible grace, the invisible gravity that seemed to pull all certainty toward it.

Mistress.

Rage ignited in Ivy’s chest, and it took everything in her to hold herself back, to not lunge at the woman and rip her apart with her bare hands. Her fingers curled into fists so tightly her knuckles screamed in protest. Every muscle in her body screamed for violence, for justice.

The woman moved closer and stopped only a few paces away. She reached up, slow as a funeral toll, and pulled back her hood.

Ivy’s breath locked in her throat.

It was her own face staring back at her.

Not a reflection, not a trick of the light. The same slope of cheek, the same eyes, the same stubborn line of the mouth. A perfect copy—except for the smile. The woman smiled with a calm, aching cruelty that Ivy had never seen in her own mirror.

Ivy staggered back, heart hammering against her ribs like it was trying to break free.

“What the hell is going on?!” she rasped, her voice a raw edge cutting through the stifling stillness. She shook her head hard, as if she could physically reject the impossibility in front of her.

The woman’s smile deepened.

“Don’t you see?” she asked, and her voice—Ivy’s voice—slipped through the air with a mocking sweetness. She raised one hand, palm up, and the darkness around them stirred.

Fragments blinked into existence.

Images floated weightless in the void. Ivy saw herself crawling on classroom carpets, bouncing in strollers, suckling at bottles, filling diapers while strangers cooed and applauded. Every trial, every humiliation, each one spinning slowly like glass shards catching the light.

“All of this,” the woman said, gesturing at the spinning memories, her voice wrapping around Ivy’s spine like a tightening rope, “this is all in your head.”

She stumbled another step back, trying to escape the storm of memories swirling around her. Her fists clenched at her sides until her nails bit into her palms.

“What... what do you mean?” she whispered, voice fraying under the pressure building behind her ribs.

The woman watched her with terrible, endless patience.

“You already know,” she said, tone almost gentle. “You’ve always known.”

Around them, the visions spun faster, the images bleeding into each other—laughter twisting into sobs, nursery rhymes cracking apart into cries of protest, soft pastel walls tightening into prison bars. Ivy could taste the pacifiers again, the powder, the cloying scents that clung to every corner of her mind. She could feel the swaddle of thick plastic around her hips, the helplessness pressing against her skin like a vice.

"I... I don't understand," Ivy said, her voice cracking. It left her mouth as little more than a whisper, yet it somehow carried across the endless void.

The woman turned without a word.

And the world around them shifted.

The tiled floor fell away beneath Ivy's feet, replaced by hard-packed snow and jagged stones, the sharp scent of ice and mountain wind battering against her skin. The sky above was a bruised, heavy gray, and they stood atop a cragged peak, the valley yawning wide and merciless below. Ivy shivered violently despite the layers of childish fabric swaddling her body—the frilled skirt, the thick, swollen diaper—none of it offering any armor against the chill that gnawed at her bones.

But it wasn’t the cold that truly hollowed her out.

It was the sight below.

The train—the same train she had boarded moments ago—was tumbling down the mountainside in pieces. The wreckage twisted and churned against the white snow like a wounded beast thrashing in its death throes. Carriages split open, their frames mangled and torn, metal shrieking as it folded in on itself. Smoke bled into the sky in black, shuddering plumes.

"It's truly a miracle you lived," the woman whispered, her voice cutting through the gale.

Ivy swallowed hard, her throat dry, her heart hammering against the cage of her ribs. She lunged forward, feet crunching against the brittle snow, drawn by the terrible gravity of the scene unfolding below.

The woman's hands were clasped behind her back.

Ivy's gaze tracked the train's doomed descent. Her breath caught as she noticed it—an anomaly among the chaos. One carriage, her carriage, flung free from the others. It bounced down the slope, end over end, skidding over the ice until it teetered at the lip of a gaping ravine.

Before Ivy could even take another breath, the ground shifted again beneath her.

Suddenly, they were there, standing at the very edge of the chasm.

Ivy recoiled, her toes scraping against the loose edge of frostbitten stone.

The carriage tipped, then plunged into the darkness without a sound. It plummeted, swallowed by a void so deep that even the echo of its impact never rose back to meet them. It simply... vanished.

“Perhaps it was the portal that truly saved you," the woman said, her voice calm, reflective, as if she were reciting a line from a history book rather than pronouncing a death sentence. "Perhaps without its mercy, you’d have been just another name on the list."

Ivy tore her gaze from the ravine and turned on the woman. Confusion and terror made her whole body tremble.

"But you didn’t," the woman continued, smiling with that same maddening, knowing curve of the lips. "You lived, Ivy. You lived... but not unchanged."

The wind howled around them, lifting the edges of the woman's cloak, tugging at Ivy’s hair like icy fingers, but neither moved.

"What happened?" Ivy asked, her voice smaller than she intended, swallowed almost whole by the vastness around them.

The woman smiled, and the world shifted again.

The mountain, the ravine, replaced by the sterile, humming brightness of a hospital ward. The air smelled sharp with disinfectant. Monitors beeped in slow, steady rhythms, their screens casting cold blue glows across the polished tile floor. Ivy stood rooted, the tile cold against her bare feet, as the enormity of it settled onto her chest.

They were in the pediatric intensive care unit.

She knew it without needing to be told. Knew it by the rows of cribs, by the lowered voices of nurses behind half-drawn curtains, by the quiet, watchful desperation that hung over everything.

But it was the crib directly in front of her that stole the breath from her lungs.

She approached, step by slow, halting step, until she stood beside it. The cot was small, with rails pulled high, and the mattress covered in soft, pastel-colored sheets. Inside, tangled in a web of wires and blinking monitors, lay herself.

Her body—battered, bruised, half-swallowed by hospital blankets—lay still beneath the relentless attentions of machines. A breathing tube was taped awkwardly to her mouth. IV lines threading into the crooks of her arms. Bandages covered half her forehead. Cuts and scrapes blooming like bruised flowers across her skin.

The woman stood silently beside her, gazing down at the broken figure with a look of almost reverence.

"Amazon technology is truly wonderful," she said, her voice rich with a weight Ivy couldn’t name. "It can heal bones shattered to dust, knit torn flesh with a whisper of light. It can rebuild a body that by all rights should be gone."

Ivy didn’t move.

"But," the woman continued, folding her hands neatly behind her back, "while it can mend the body, it cannot reach the mind. It cannot will a soul to return. That takes more. That takes you."

Movement caught at the edge of her vision.

She turned.

Beside the crib, hunched close as if hoping their proximity alone could anchor her to the world, stood two figures. A man and a woman. Finn and Clara.

Finn cradled Clara in his arms, one hand stroking slow, soothing circles along her back as she wept into his chest. He wore a face carved in grief, his mouth a thin, trembling line. His eyes were hollow, rimmed red. Empty in a way that made Ivy’s stomach twist.

"They found you," the woman said, her voice gentle. "After you fell through the portal, after you tumbled between one broken world and the next. They found you. Rescued you. Brought you here. Nursed you back to the edge of life."

Ivy’s hands trembled at her sides.

"But the rest," the woman said, tilting her head, studying Ivy with something almost tender, "is up to you."

The monitors beeped steadily, indifferent to the agony playing out around them.

Ivy stepped closer to the crib, reaching out with shaking fingers. She hovered just above the bruised shell of herself, afraid to touch, afraid to confirm that this wasn’t just another hallucination stitched together by grief and guilt.

A sob clawed its way up Ivy’s throat, sharp and burning, but she forced it down, blinking furiously.

She felt disoriented, as if she were losing herself. Caught somewhere between the broken thing in the crib and the battered soul standing beside it.

"Every trial, every contestant," the woman said, her voice low and sure, "was your mind fighting to rebuild what was lost. Each challenge, each humiliation, each fleeting moment of triumph... a battle within you to mend the fractures, to reforge what was broken."

Her words fell around Ivy like the softest snowfall, yet each one carried weight—each syllable pressing insistently against the raw places inside her. Ivy stood frozen beside the crib. Yet now, she could feel something else: a tug, subtle and insistent, pulling her toward the still form wrapped in hospital linens. Her body yearned for her like a tether pulled taut across the chasm of her own mind.

But there was another pull.

Fainter, yet somehow deeper. A current beneath the surface of everything, whispering of something far vaster than the bruised limits of her skin. Something that was not merely survival, not simply waking, but becoming.

The woman stepped closer, her shadow stretched long across the sterile tiles.

"Your old life is gone," she said softly, reverently, as if mourning a beloved song faded from memory. "But this new life, with your new Mommy and Daddy, could be yours. If you choose it."

Ivy turned toward the great beyond—the yawning, invisible force that pulled at her soul. It shimmered in the edges of her awareness, a horizon with no end, a future with no form.

"And what if I don't?" Ivy asked, her voice barely more than a breath against the drone of machines and the endless stillness.

The woman smiled, a slow, gentle thing.

"Then this is the end of the line," she said.

No malice. No sorrow. Just truth, laid bare between them.

Ivy turned back toward the crib. Toward Clara and Finn.

They sat wrapped in each other's arms, a tableau of grief and devotion carved against the blinding sterility of the hospital. Clara’s shoulders shook with silent sobs. Finn stroked her hair, murmuring words Ivy could not hear, his face etched with a desperate tenderness and sorrow.

"Was it them?" she asked the woman, her voice cracking like ice under strain. "The whole time?"

The woman nodded once, solemnly.

"They were the ones trying to reach you. Across every barrier. Through every illusion."

The dreams—those fleeting, fragile moments when she had floated on a sea of warmth and safety. When soft arms had cradled her, and low voices had sung her to sleep. When bottles had been pressed to her lips and pacifiers tucked gently between her teeth. Moments where the ache of loneliness had ebbed, replaced by something sweeter, more complete.

She had been the baby in those dreams.

The memory enveloped her, so vivid she could feel the soft cotton against her skin, hear the faint hum of lullabies in her ears, taste the gentle sweetness of safety on her tongue.

It would be so easy.

The tug in her heart grew stronger, coaxing, promising.

The woman’s hand settled lightly on her shoulder.

"You can have it," she said softly, her breath warm against the side of Ivy’s face. "It’s yours for the taking."

And between the pull of love and the call of the unknown, Ivy stood poised—suspended between two worlds, two selves—feeling the final choice gather around her like the coming of a storm.

Ivy knew.

The certainty settled into her bones with the weight of inevitability, pressing deeper than thought, deeper than fear. Her eyes snapped open, the decision burning in her chest like a star newly born, fierce and absolute.

She stepped forward.

The pull intensified, invisible fingers wrapping around her very soul, tugging her toward the frail body swaddled in wires and tubes.

The moment she let herself go, the world buckled.

Her vision shattered into a thousand specks of light, collapsing inward until only the girl in the crib remained—the girl who was her, the girl she had fought to reclaim across nightmare after nightmare. She was falling now, drawn into the fragile vessel below, caught in a current so strong it stole the breath from her lungs, the thought from her mind.

Darkness swallowed her whole.

But this darkness was not void, not loss—it was movement, a vortex pulling her deeper and deeper. She could feel it now: the tiny body beneath her touch, raw and battered, chest rising and falling with the thin, artificial rhythm of the ventilator. She felt the tubes taped across bruised skin, the itching sting of bandages, the heavy, unyielding presence of the machines working to keep her heart beating.

Pain bloomed at the edges of her awareness, but growing brighter by the second.

Something inside her clicked into place.

The world shattered again.

A rush of sensation slammed into her like a breaking tide. The sterile chill of the hospital air against her cheeks. The low, rhythmic beep of the monitors. The scratch of fabric against her skin. The scent of antiseptic thick in her nostrils.

And then—

With a gasp, Ivy opened her eyes.

For a moment, the light was blinding, searing through the delicate veil of her lashes. Everything burned—sound, color, feeling—until it coalesced into sharp, aching clarity. The ceiling above her was white, spotted with faint watermarks. A mobile hung nearby, motionless, adorned with soft pastel stars.

She blinked slowly, the motion dragging as if every muscle had to remember its purpose.

Movement caught at the edge of her vision.

She turned her head with agonizing slowness.

Finn was there, hunched forward in the plastic chair beside her crib, his hand clutched tight around Clara’s. His face was buried in her hair, his shoulders shaking. Clara sat rigid in his embrace, her hands fisted in his jacket, her body locked between hope and despair.

A sob broke from Ivy’s throat, hoarse and weak.

Finn’s head snapped up.

His eyes met hers—and for a moment, time itself seemed to stagger to a halt.

The tears on his face glistened under the harsh hospital lights. His mouth opened in a silent gasp. Then he moved, fumbling forward, his hand reaching through the crib rails, brushing her cheek with trembling fingers as if he didn’t dare believe she was real.

"Ivy," he choked out, voice cracked and broken with disbelief.

Clara jerked upright, following his gaze—and when she saw Ivy’s eyes open, her sobs broke free, raw and racking, as she stood beside the crib, leaning down and embracing Ivy as best as she could.